VTT Research

“We use Projectplace on a daily basis to collaborate, share and plan our project activities. Projectplace enables us to store all project information in one place, so it can be easily accessed and enriched by all project participants.”Dr. Boris Krassi Senior scientist, VTT ManuVAR project coordinator

VTT Technical Research Center of Finland

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is coordinator of ManuVAR, a project funded by the EU to use virtual and augmented reality to improve manual work. The project encompasses 100 people in 18 partner organisations across eight European countries. The ManuVAR has a €9.7M budget, 690 person-months of effort taking place over three years, 2009-2012.

Challenge

The ManuVAR project comprises universities, research institutes, large enterprises and small and medium sized companies distributed across 18 offices in eight European countries. As project coordinator, Dr. Boris Krassi, senior scientist at VTT, was tasked with quickly launching a project management and collaboration system that could support the large distributed network of partners.

Solution

Communication and collaboration are key for such a large distributed high-performance consortium. To avoid conflict with internal IT policies of the partners and to reduce ongoing maintenance a web-based service was required. After conducting market research, the team found that Projectplace is one of the most cost-efficient, fast-to-implement and easy- to-learn systems for online collaboration.

Getting Projectplace up and running was easy. ManuVAR was able to start the project immediately in Projectplace right after the final agreement on the payment. A permanent customer manager was allocated to the project so ensure a smooth implementation and ManuVAR was impressed with the rapid response to technical support queries. The implementation was so successful that over the course of the first year, ManuVAR expanded the project, adding additional storage and extra licenses in Projectplace.